The hardest part of making this book was cutting out space for the twill tape in the covers. I love the end result. I made another book following this tutorial. I will write about that one in another blog post.

The next card is for the daughter of two of my good friends. As you can obviously see there seems to be a particular colour combination that I like very much ;) Besides using the stencils I also used for the other cards, I made my own from a butterfly die by Tim Holtz. This is attempt number two, the first one ended up being too dark. I like this card very much.

Today a small post about inchies. Inchies are small square shaped pieces of art, usually in collageform. Almost every medium can be used, in the quilting world for instance fabric squares are quit popular. Inchies are much fun since they are easy to make, although the small size can be a bit challenging when you want to add text for instance.

See below for an example my inchies, they are alphabet-themed. Made with Tilda papers, some leftover gift wrap and stamps.

I made two books this week that were bound in the Secret Belgian Binding-method. This type of binding was invented in the '80's of the 20th century by Belgian bookbinder Anne Goy. She was looking for a Western alternative to Japanese stab-stitching, a method that has the stitches that bind the signatures together visible on the spine. The Secret Belgian Binding has mysterious qualities because at first sight it isn´t exactly clear how the signatures are sown into the book. Although the spine has visible stitching, these stitches only seem to serve as a way to connect both covers to each other. What´s also remarkable about this binding is that the covers and spine are loose, they are not connected to each other by glue.

After following Monique's tutorial this binding is not a secret to me any more. I made two books, one for myself and one for my friend. I always recommend making projects like this twice, because you can learn from the mistakes you made the first time.